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827259
article-commentary2019
BPI0010.1177/1369148119827259The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsMcKinnon
Breakthrough Commentary
The British Journal of Politics and
Climate justice in the International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(2) 279–286
© The Author(s) 2019
endgame for 2 degrees Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1369148119827259
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Catriona McKinnon
Keywords
climate engineering, climate justice, climate policy, environmental pragmatism, moral anger,
subsistence emissions
One of the most striking features of Henry Shue’s work on climate justice is its moral
anger. Shue calls out inadequate governmental action on climate change since 1992 as
shameful and pathetic. He describes most countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions
(NDCs) under the Paris Agreement as ‘paltry’, ‘pitiful’ and ‘farcical’. Those in the Trump
administration are called ‘environmental vandals’. For many people, the righteous anger
that simmers beneath the surface of his words is the morally and emotionally appropriate
response to the delays in political action on climate change that have left us with just 18
years until the carbon budget for two degrees is depleted.1 Shue’s moral anger is crystal-
lised in his denunciation of climate policies that depend on some people sacrificing sub-
sistence in order that others can enjoy luxuries. The earliest versions of this critical line
focus on emissions created by subsistence in a global economy locked in to fossil fuels.
Later versions – including this Breakthrough Article – expand the call for protection of
the means to subsistence as a non-negotiable feature of any just transition to a zero carbon
global economy. As Shue (2019: xxx) puts it, ‘the politically crucial question of the fair
sharing of burdens cannot be evaded and will not be forgotten’.
Here, I offer two unconnected reflections. The first relates to the general importance of
calling out injustice in climate policymaking, of which Shue’s work is a paragon. The
second suggests ways in which to extend the work that can be done by the moral impera-
tive that undergirds Shue’s original commitment to subsistence emissions, and now his
support for the Climate Equity Reference Framework (CERF) in the transition to a zero
carbon global economy.
Calling out unjust climate policy
Shue’s calling out of egregious injustices in political action on climate change has been
resisted. Some people have denied that the climate wrongdoers Shue identifies (most
Centre for Climate and Justice, University of Reading, Reading, UK
Corresponding author:
Catriona McKinnon, Reading Centre for Climate and Justice, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading
RG6 6AA, UK.
Email: c.mckinnon@reading.ac.uk280 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(2)
frequently, the United States) are in fact at fault (Posner and Weisbach, 2010). Others
have claimed that taking feasibility seriously puts most of the injustices identified by
Shue beyond the scope of climate policymaking (Gardiner and Weisbach, 2016), that
most ethical judgements underdetermine decisions on climate policy (Hulme, 2009; Light
and Taraska, 2016), or that economic valuation must be used to capture everything that
matters in climate policymaking, including the ethical stakes (Tol, 2008).2
I shall focus on a different path of resistance, which takes seriously the requirement
that climate policy must serve the ends of climate justice. This is the ‘pragmatist’ view
that if climate policy is to be an effective instrument of climate justice, the ethical demands
of the ideals of climate justice must not be at too great a distance from the actual pro-
cesses and parameters of climate policymaking (Light, 2011). For example, ethically
infused thinking about climate justice could miss the policy mark if the standards it
applies to policy proposals are too abstract (e.g. ‘the dignity of all must be respected’) or
too rhetorical (e.g. ‘let us heal the Earth’). It is obvious that a good way for moral argu-
ments and ethical values to make a difference to political action on climate change is to
engage with the details of climate policies; ideally, as these policies are being decided or
implemented. But we should not ignore a serious risk in this sort of engagement, namely,
that immersion in policy analysis can become nothing but policy analysis. Disappearing
down this rabbit hole risks letting the policy intervention drift loose from its moral anchor.
When this happens it can be hard to tell whether a pragmatist policy intervention in the
name of climate justice hits its mark because the intervention has been so leached of free-
standing ethical commitments that its original purpose is obscured.
In reality, then, any climate ethicist aspiring to engage with policy to make it serve
climate justice can miss the mark in two ways. Too distant from policy, and the ethics
become irrelevant; too close to policy, and the ethics disappear. Instead, the ideal should
be to bring independently justified ethical principles into policy debates in ways that
make the connection between the principles and the policy recommendation ethically
readable both to those involved in policy discourse, and to people beyond these narrow
circles. A policy is ethically readable when the ways in which it promotes, or is consistent
with, an ethical principle is (or can be made) clear to publics whose interests are protected
by the principle. For climate policy, the relevant publics encompass the whole of human-
ity; in particular, those portions of humanity most vulnerable to ethically unacceptable
climate policy, namely, the world’s poorest people, including those not yet born.3 Ethical
readability matters for reasons of accountability: people affected by a policy should be
able to assess how well that policy protects their interests. Arguably, ethical readability
also matters for its own sake: policy ought to be constrained by at least some ethical prin-
ciples. The policies we get by taking ethical readability seriously will depend on the ethi-
cal principles that apply in the case.
Here, I want to focus on a different reason why ethical readability matters. This is that
leaching climate policy of ethical content by too much well-intentioned policy wonkery
– and thereby failing standards of ethical readability – could do damage to people most
vulnerable to climate change, for the following reasons. We know that moral convictions
about climate change can be motivating and likely to stimulate action in the right circum-
stances (Markowitz and Shariff, 2012). Circumstances that are not right include those in
which people with moral convictions about climate change lack efficacy with respect to
bringing about the outcomes they value. When people repeatedly fail to influence politi-
cal decision making in ways that are informed by what they care about, their inefficacy
can curdle into apathy or defensiveness (Täuber et al., 2015). If what people care about isMcKinnon 281
justice in climate policy, this is bad news insofar as it dilutes pressure from below on poli-
ticians to craft just climate policy.
We should be worried about this situation given the following facts. Climate impacts
will cause most damage to people in the world’s poorest countries. Rich countries have
the greatest potential to minimise these unjust damages because their historical responsi-
bility for climate change has endowed them with a capacity to slash emissions (as required
by climate justice) that is not matched by equivalent capacities in poorer countries. The
historical emissions of the richest countries have enabled them to develop in ways that
have made them resilient to the climate change that now makes carbon-intensive develop-
ment by the poorest countries of the world impossible if we are to achieve the highest
ambitions of the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, these countries also bear most responsi-
bility as a result of their present emissions. Rich, climate resilient countries have more
direct control over the flow of emissions that are on course to deplete the carbon budget,
and can be asked to bear enormous cuts to these emissions without significant ethical
loss, given that a large proportion are luxury emissions.
Taking these facts together, the action on climate change of the world’s richest and
most climate resilient countries has greater potential to minimise climate injustice than
that of the world’s poorest and least resilient countries: these countries can prevent (or at
least, slow down) depletion of the carbon budget in ways demanded by climate justice,
and have a duty to lead on this task.4 If citizens of the richest and most stable countries in
the world become apathetic and defensive about just climate policy, they are far less
likely to exercise whatever influence they have – for example, through non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) – on climate policymakers at national and global levels to avoid
unjust climate policy.
Here is where the ethical readability of climate policy matters for climate justice. In
the face of climate policy deliberations leached of explicit ethical commitments, it could
easily appear to people committed to climate justice that a major route to avoiding climate
injustice has been shut down. The protestations of well-intentioned policy wonks that the
train is still on track, despite appearances to the contrary, risk leaving ethically motivated
people enervated. For such people, the values of justice they cleave to must be recognis-
able in climate policy that (at least) avoids injustice. If the climate policy of the world’s
richest and most climate resilient countries remains egregiously unjust, despite the best
efforts of climate justice champions in those countries, a wellspring of ethical criticism of
these policies could run dry. However dim they are now, if the lights go out on climate
justice in public discourse about climate change, the prospects for policy designed to
minimise climate injustice will become even shakier, given how enormously tempting it
is for politicians to make self-serving decisions and dress them up as pragmatic climate
action (Gardiner, 2011).5 By insisting on climate policies that make their climate justice
commitments readable to people who care about climate justice, we will increase the
likelihood of achieving more climate justice by bolstering the efficacy of people disposed
to put the right kind of pressure on political leaders.6
I have argued that we must bring policy discourse closer to whatever ethically informed
public discourse exists. This means encouraging policy discussions explicitly to address
the justice and ethics dimensions of the policies in ways that make the justice outcomes
of the policies readable as such to people who are committed to climate justice. Policy-
engaged work, such as that by Shue on subsistence emissions, is vital for the generation
of these discussions. This type of ethically engaged policy discourse would not only
avoid enervating people already committed to climate justice, it could also spread these282 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(2)
commitments. One good way to bring outsiders into a normative debate – so that they
become motivated by the ethical principles around which the praise and blame practices
of any society are oriented – is for political leaders to unambiguously and clearly govern
in ways that promote values around which a sense of belonging can coalesce, and from
which ethical convictions can be strengthened (Täuber et al., 2015: 460–461).7 Rather
than seeking pragmatic routes to climate policies that risk draining away climate justice
altogether, policymakers could be crafting climate policies so as to build and strengthen
values friendly to climate justice in the communities they serve. The steps from this pro-
cess to legislative and policy change to promote a robust vision of climate justice might
then be taken more quickly.
Henry Shue’s insistence that basic rights to subsistence – the rights of people we are
moving with together through time, and the rights of people whose world will be what we
make it – provides fuel for these processes. His earliest presentations of the division of the
remaining carbon budget as a zero sum game between those whose lives depend on sub-
sistence emissions, and those whose pleasures require continued luxury emissions, has a
force that does not depend on accepting any high moral theory. Now that remaining
within the budget looks impossible with emissions reductions alone, making NETs and a
massive upscaling of renewables necessary for us to avoid catastrophic warming, the
basic right to subsistence retains its force.
Climate engineering and the constraints of justice
In his Breakthrough Article, Shue shows the clear policy implications of protecting the
basic right to subsistence in our present endgame for transition to a zero carbon global
economy. First, he shows how the CERF for assessing NDCs under the Paris Agreement
supports subsistence emissions for development for countries below a morally defensible
threshold. At the same time, CERF offers a two pronged construal of the mitigation duties
of rich, high emitting countries: their luxury emissions must be reduced and they must
finance renewables in countries below the development threshold, until zero carbon is
achieved.8 And second, he identifies the threats to basic rights to subsistence that are cre-
ated if NDCs fail to conform to CERF, which could make increasingly heavy reliance on
large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) a serious policy option. As Shue argues, the
CDR technology assumed by most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
scenarios in which warming is limited to two degrees or less – bioenergy combined with
carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – requires land and water usage that will compete
with what is needed to satisfy the subsistence rights of the world’s poorest people. Given
the sorry history of how the world’s highest emitting and richest countries have prioritised
their luxury emissions over the subsistence emissions of the most vulnerable members of
the human community, we have reason to be seriously worried about this pattern repeat-
ing in a climate engineered world of BECCS (Shue, 2017).
In fact, I think the threats to basic rights in the endgame for limiting warming to two
degrees are even greater than shown by Shue. CDR is not the only type of climate engi-
neering. In addition, solar radiation management (SRM) is being discussed as a way to
buy additional time for emissions reductions. Although CDR and SRM are both forms of
climate engineering insofar as they involve ‘deliberate large-scale manipulation of the plan-
etary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change’ (The Royal Society, 2009:
1), they operate differently. Whereas CDR removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,McKinnon 283
SRM methods reduce warming without extracting any greenhouse gases. SRM methods
deflect solar radiation away from the planet by increasing the planet’s albedo through
altering the reflectivity of the surface, clouds, or the atmosphere. A prominent field exper-
iment for SRM technology is due to take place soon and the pace may pick up thereafter.9
There are signs that geoengineering is catching the attention of legislators and diplomats:
the US Senate appropriations committee recently passed a spending bill that included
funding to support geoengineering research (Nuccitelli, 2016), there have been recent US
house subcommittee hearings on geoengineering, and the head of the IPCC, Hoesung
Lee, has said that Panel should be examining SRM – including its governance – very seri-
ously (Goldberg, 2016).10
The particular form of SRM around which most activity is happening is stratospheric
aerosol injection (SAI), which proposes to deliver reflective particles (most commonly,
sulphur) to the stratosphere. Prominent scientific researchers in SRM make the case for
accelerated research in this area in terms of SRM as a potentially powerful, relatively
cheap, and effective tool to achieve a reduction in the rate of temperature increase to buy
time for mitigation (Keith, 2013; MacMartin et al., 2014). Although SRM research is in
its infancy, it is not hard to imagine its allure (McMahon, 2017), especially for rich coun-
tries that declare their luxury emissions as a way of life,11 billionaire philanthropists
enthusiastic about techno-fixes (Nelsen, 2017), and fossil fuel companies who see the end
coming and need to feed the bottom line.
Just as with BECCS, the most sober calls for research into SRM declare commitment
to protecting the world’s most vulnerable people (Horton and Keith, 2016). However, a
number of studies have suggested that, whether deployed uniformly across the globe, or
concentrated in a particular hemisphere, SAI could have disastrous effects on the world’s
poorest people. Models have suggested that SAI could disrupt Asian and African summer
monsoons (Robock et al., 2008), reduce precipitation in Africa, South America and South
East Asia (Svoboda et al., 2011), increase tropical cyclone frequency (Jones et al., 2013),
and cause drought in the Sahel (Haywood et al., 2013). Noting this, two leading figures
in the SRM scientific research community reply that ‘[i]ntroducing multiple spatial and
temporal degrees of freedom [in insolation reduction] has the potential to improve how
well SRM can compensate for CO2-induced climate change, and thus reduce concerns
over the resulting regional inequalities’ (Macmartin et al., 2013: 365). In other words,
enabling deployment of SRM at different places on the globe, at different times, could
allay the worst outcomes for the world’s poorest people without diminishing the overall
cooling benefits of SAI. This is, the authors suggest, a way of making more palatable the
range of ‘trade-offs’ SAI necessitates.
We should not be reassured by this suggestion. Regional and temporal variations in
SAI deployment would not remove the need for trade-offs; redolent as it is of maximising
consequentialism in policy making, the language of ‘trade-offs’ should set ethical alarm
bells ringing. From Rio onwards, rich and powerful countries responsible for climate
change have without fail prioritised their luxury emissions over the subsistence emissions
of poor and vulnerable countries with miniscule historical emissions. It is naïve to the
point of incredulity to think that these same countries could be trusted to trade off their
own luxury emissions so as to give priority to the basic subsistence rights of the world’s
poorest people. Introducing regional and temporal variations in SAI deployment has the
potential to twist the ‘moral hazard’ created by SRM so as to pin the world’s poorest peo-
ple at the end of the spike of delayed emissions reductions by the rich.12284 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(2)
Perhaps this situation is not inevitable. Perhaps, with the right governance of the
research and development of SRM, the ethically horrible dangers of potential deployment
could be neutralised (Chhetri et al., 2018). This outcome can only happen if we strenuously
align policy and governance conversations with demanding ideals of climate justice, with
Shue’s work on the moral primacy of subsistence over luxury at front of this mix.
My comments here have been supportive of Shue’s approach: there is no point in postur-
ing otherwise when the stakes are so high. Shue was one of the first political philosophers
to present the challenges of climate change as ethical problems. His moral clarity of vision
and analytical power have combined to identify ethically acceptable, and morally heinous,
climate policies, in ways that speak to people across the spectrums of theory and practice,
and from many different disciplinary perspectives. Very few political philosophers have
achieved this goal. If we aim to get through this century’s climate crisis with any semblance
of justice in our means and ends, we need Shue’s body of work as our guide.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Alex McLaughlin and anonymous referees of this journal for their useful written comments. I
am also grateful from feedback from Elizabeth Cripps, Giovanna Di Chiro, Robert Falkner, David Schlosberg,
Henry Shue, and others present at a workshop in July 2018 held at the Reading Centre for Climate and Justice,
at which the papers in this special issue were discussed.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. ‘Carbon Countdown Clock’, The Guardian. Available at https://goo.gl/AWzoGX (accessed 6 March
2018).
2. For critique see Spash (2017).
3. There are hard questions about how to ensure the interests of future people are respected in climate
policymaking, and politics. For creative answers, see González-Ricoy and Gosseries (2016).
4. As Shue points out, these countries in fact have a duty to do far more than this. Given the failure of past
political action to significantly reduce emissions, cuts must be accompanied by technology and resource
transfer to enable net zero without violating the basic rights of people at risk of losing land and access to
water through, for example, BECCS (Shue, 2017).
5. Of course, the most obvious reason why climate policy ought to promote climate justice is that policymakers
– like everyone else – have duties to promote justice.
6. An additional benefit of ethical readability is that is keeps alive hope for climate justice. See McKinnon
(2014).
7. See Caney (2012).
8. I do not mean to suggest here that emissions reductions and scaling up of renewables ala CERF is suf-
ficient for zero carbon.
9. See https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/ (accessed 8 November 2018).
10. See Chhetri et al. (2018).
11. Just before the start of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, President George H.W. Bush declared,
‘The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period’.
12. The terminology of ‘moral hazard’ originates in debates about insurance. The central thought is that when
insurance is in place to cover an unwelcome outcome, people are less likely to avoid the behaviour that
increases the likelihood of the outcome. Applied to geoengineering, the central worry is deployment – or
even just research into the technology – could undermine mitigation through reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions. See Hale (2012).
ORCID iD
Catriona McKinnon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0434-1083McKinnon 285
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